The Milk Goes Off
by Garmonbozia
Summary: Time stops, and yet somehow the milk still turns.  Sometimes you just need to talk to someone else who gets it.  Oneshot, post-Silencio Falls, if you know what I mean.


You still need milk.

How the hell does that happen? I mean, they _literally_ read out a poem about stopping all the clocks and somehow, still, you need milk. For instance, it's been two days. You pull yourself up from the sofa, because you've thought of cereal. And you're so proud of yourself because cereal is the thing, short of unbuttered bread, that requires the _least_ effort in the entire kitchen, and you thought of it. Still a lot of effort, though. Getting the bowl and shaking out the cereal without overfilling the bowl, and sweeping the bits you don't get in the bowl onto the floor, that's effort. That's exhausting. And then you go to the fridge and you get the milk. And the milk is a kind of semi-solid curd of a light green tinge that probably isn't safe to drink. You sniff and consider trying it anyway. And then you realize, you still need milk.

Even after the world ends and everybody's dead, milk will still go off.

That there, by the way, that was a hypothetical situation. That's not something that's actually happened. Well, it probably has, but not to me. I'm a writer, sometimes; I write things. Make things up.

I'm out buying milk under circumstances entirely unrelated to the ones described above.

Actually hasn't been as bad as I thought. I got to the shop in one piece, and I remembered things like 'please' and 'thank you' and waiting for change. I've been having to remind myself. All the things I used to have to say out loud, and to him, they're still there. Sometimes it's a comfort and sometimes, most times, it's horrible.

This, however, this is the difficult part. This is being out, and having paid, and having milk and even _beans_, and _bread_, and the energy to _heat_ the beans and bread and transform them by culinary magic into some kind of _meal_, alleluia, and now having to go back. And I don't want to go back. That sofa is still there and that sofa is a dangerous thing. That sofa eats your ability to do anything. It's cursed. I don't believe in all that, of course, but what can you do when it's right in front of you? When it's in your front room you can't exactly deny it anymore.

Or, in short, I'm losing my mind sitting in that flat.

And as I start to walk, the heavens open, and I duck into the nearest doorway. Coffee shop. Smell of bacon. This is a sign.

I let myself in. Busy, at this time of day, and with the rain. And me with my shopping bag in one hand. Accident waiting to happen, really.

It happens to a red-headed woman in a blue jumper and denim jacket. And sunglasses and a hat.

Don't have to be _him_ to notice something's going on.

Long story short, she ends up wearing her coffee, and I remember that I'm supposed to mumble apologetically and offer to replace it. She refuses at first, 'No, no, it's okay', but there's enough of the social left in me to know that's just what happens. I'm supposed to insist, so I insist. And she's supposed to accept, so she accepts. Something in it, in the exhausted, basic way she does it, that strikes home.

A part of me I thought the sofa had gotten wakes up, and I don't order the bacon sandwich. She's not eating, you see. I just get her coffee and mine. Then I look about until I find her. A seat by the window. Two seats, actually, but she's by herself. No other seats left, now that the rain's really coming down outside.

"Do you… Do you mind if I-?"

"Hm? Oh…" She nods. "Go ahead."

But she shifts, sinking around in the chair, staring out the window as the crowd thins off the street. Which leaves me nothing to do but watch inside. Otherwise I'm going to look like I'm staring at her. But it means I'm looking at all these people. People with wet hair or shaking umbrellas, with briefcases and shopping bags and students with ring binders. Just a couple of weeks ago I would have come in here with him and I would have known, before the coffee had had a chance to cool, what each of those students was studying, what was in the briefcases, which couples were newly minted and which were unhappy. You know. The usual. All these people need milk.

They're all locked again now.

The woman. The woman has a Scottish accent, which means something. And she's hiding as much of her face as she can, and that must really mean something too. She's well dressed and sad and staring out the window. That means something.

Wedding ring. Wedding ring means she's _married_.

Go, John, go.

Don't ever let it be said I didn't learn anything. Don't ever let it be said because it isn't true. Not just about briefcases and wedding rings either, so don't ever, _ever_, let that be said, because it's lies.

"Have you got a problem, at all?" A hard edge on the Scottish voice. Means she's annoyed with me. Means I've been staring, just a bit, at the wedding ring. Not for the reasons she thinks, but that's the difference, now, isn't it? Have to start pretending again. Stopped pretending because there was no point, but now I have to start again.

"No, sorry. You just… I was thinking of somebody else."

"Oh. Alright, sorry. I'm… I'm not in the best of moods. Sorry."

And she goes back to the window. Sliding the sunglasses back up her nose. Yeah, she took them down to look at me. The eyes, the big brown eyes, hold on a minute. Hold on a minute.

"Excuse me, do… do I know you from somewhere?"

"No."

"I… I really think I've seen you. Did… did we meet on a case or something, recently, I mean?"

"No. You don't know me. You've never seen me before."

But that's not true. And now I'm interested. My God, if I can't do this one for him what am I worth? If I can't figure this one out I might as well just let the sofa take me. There's one for the blog, 'The sofa ate my soul'. Haven't posted anything lately. Hits are through the roof, of course, everybody looking for the angle, for the story. Bloody vultures. They'll have nothing out of me.

The eyes. I can't get the eyes out of my head. Where would I have seen a pair of brown eyes that burned themselves so clearly onto my memory that even now, even _now_, starving, deprived even of cereal, reduced to the basic level of milk-getting and with a sofa in possession of most of my immortal parts, I remember?

A pair of eyes, out a window.

Giant eyes.

Giant eyes blown up huge and beautiful. Eyes that are meant to burn into you because then you remember and you think of beauty when you see the thing in real life, tiny and extortionate on a glass counter. Perfume. Petrichor.

"Amelia Pond," I breathe.

Amelia Pond the model. Mystery solved. I've been out of touch with the world. He kept turning the TV off. Didn't like it. She was on the billboard outside Lestrade's windows for a while. One big eye either side of the divider. Petrichor. Such a funny little name. It doesn't mean anything. Not a word. Not that he knew of, anyway.

Oh, but then again, I said that name out loud, didn't I?

She leans forward, right over her knees, and looks at me over the glasses without moving them. Pointing to her head.

"You see this?"

"…You're ginger?"

"This is a hat. Which means that right now, I'm not-"

She drops her voice right down. She is about to echo that name. But her gaze goes away inside like she's just thought of something incredibly important. Something has completed the circuit and a new light is on. I've seen that look before. And my instinctive reaction has been to feel stupid, like I've missed something until now. So that's what I do this time, as well. Feels weird, being somebody else's idiot. But I say, "What? What is it?"

And she doesn't immediately deride me for my stupidity. Even though I sort of wish she would.

"Nothing," she says instead. "It doesn't matter, I just… I never realized."

Well, that's refreshing. Someone else with my particular syndrome. "Partial blindness of the mind".

I'm not quoting anybody there. I just put quote marks around it because it sounded pretentious. Just don't want to be associated with it, that's all.

"Oh, yeah, hats are the key," I say.

And she breaks into a loose, tired kind of smile. "I used to know a man who wore a lot of hats, that's all. I thought he was just… being stupid."

She drifts. Lazily, like she's not really thinking about it, she removes her sunglasses, though not the hat.

"There's always a reason," I tell her. "Even if people don't know it they do everything for a reason. If you know what you're looking for, you can tell everything there is about a-"

"You're John Watson."

"…A skill with which you are apparently more than familiar."

"You just quoted your own blog." Which means she reads it. Which means she knows. "I was supposed to say, 'Go on then'. At which point you would say, 'Oh, I don't know what I'm looking for. But I know…'"

She only stops because I've had to look away. Out the window. Into the rain, and the street, now, is nearly empty, because that's what people do, they go away. Which means she doesn't know.

Oh, this is a fun game. I'm not thinking of anything else but the things she does and what they mean. Oh, this is a good game. A distracting game, and it makes you feel clever while the clock keeps ticking and you still need milk and all those other things that make being human and being alive so bloody tedious and…

"Oh…"

"I'm sorry, have I put my foot in my mouth?"

Length of those legs she probably could and all. But I don't say that, because I'm not far gone, yet. The sofa doesn't have that much of me yet.

"He…" Go on, say it. Have to say it some day. Why not to a stranger-slash-model you just walked into in a coffee shop? Say it, John. Say it to somebody who couldn't possibly understand what it means right now. "Sherlock Holmes is dead."

She doesn't say anything then. She looks down. And then away, back out the window. The stranger-slash-model in the coffee shop, the one with no hope of understanding, does she, maybe…?

You can't tell if it's the shadow of the rain on the window, or if she cries. Not until she looks down at the coffees on the table. Black coffee, coffee she's been happily sipping since I sat down. And now, all of a sudden, she tips up the little milk jug and looks into it. Starts to stand up, "Oh, would you look at that, I'm just going to go and get one fresh-"

But she's taking her jacket and handbag with her.

I stretch a hand out. Not touching, just reaching. She stops and looks at it. With my other hand I lift the two litre jug up from the bag by my feet and put it by the table. She stares a moment. Then again, that loose, tired half a smile. A rattle of a breath that might be laughter.

"That," I tell her, "is the three-in-the-morning Comedy Central repeat laugh."

"When there's nothing else to laugh about," she says back.

Then, from under her chair, where she'd almost forgotten it, she pulls up an identical bag.

Jug of milk, loaf of bread, tin of beans.

She looks up at me. The laugh fading on a moment's eye contact. The woman, the model-slash-stranger, it's true, she understands. "You shouldn't need it all, should you? Because they don't need it anymore."

It doesn't feel forward, doesn't feel familiar, to lift just the ends of her fingers into one hand, and rest the other over them.


End file.
